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Young Students Prepare to Create School Newspaper

Miss Dean's fifth grade class at WES are eager to begin a school newspaper. (Photo by Jayna Smith).

Plans are underway for a school newspaper at Woodland Elementary School. The paper will be written, designed, and published by those in the fifth grade beginning this month. The 15 students who make up Miss Dean’s class are eager to begin the project and have been learning grammar rules and the mechanics of writing, in addition to using their creativity for special writing assignments.

The project was spear-headed by 10-year old Riley Cleghorn after hearing the possibility of such a paper at his cousin’s nearby school. He explained that he approached his teacher with the thought and has since had many ideas with regards to the paper. “We’ll be writing articles, interviewing the teachers, seeing what’s new in the other classes,” Cleghorn stated. “I signed up for the fun page on the back. I draw comics a lot in class.”

The idea of a school newspaper was well-received by his classmates, Cleghorn said. “We realized everybody would want to join (the school newspaper) because it’s a new thing. Usually when something new comes everybody wants to join so there’d be no one to give papers to because everyone would know the news. We decided to keep (the publishing of) it just in the fifth grade.”

The class took part in a question-and-answer session last week with a reporter from The Calais Advertiser. The attentive students had a variety of questions, ranging from news gathering to advertising sales. Each also enjoyed their complimentary copy of the paper.

“I don’t know the exact time and date we’ll actually make our newspaper but we’re planning on starting out slow and doing it monthly,” Cleghorn said.